Part Three: All That Glitters is (Still) Gold European Economy 1914-2000

Part Three: All That Glitters is (Still) Gold
The European Economy 1914-2000
Derek H. Aldcroft(2001)

If I can pinpoint the frames of reference for the world's continued interest in gold it would have to be that it is shiny and heavy. It catches the eye like no other metal. That makes speculators seem as magpies. But is an accurate depiction of speculator. An investment opportunity catches the eye, it is lifted away and hoarded in a nest until someone with something brighter and shinier comes along and a transaction is made. But what else could reasonably take its place in the shine department? When I was living in the UAE I was amazed at how many shops hung the stuff from their windows in block after block of tangible assets. It drew in crowds. There was a hum in the air. It was gold. Whole fleets and flocks of it. I caught a little bit of that gold bug. My suspicion that gold was something worth having around was not just based on my visits to Dubai Gold Souk. It took more than rich people hanging around it to pass on that flu.

I caught it in about 2002 following extensive travels around South India and Sri Lanka. Bobbing along on tuk-tuks in and around cracks and fissures where buses sink in to the pavement up to their axles from Madekeri to Tirumali and Tirupati and back twice. Shaking and shimmying around for about two and a half months, I concluded that a large proportion of current and future customers of the shiny stuff still remain working class or rural farming class in the billions in the developing world. Whenever I would pop in to the only ATM in town sometimes, or the only bank for miles to cash travellers cheques, there was always a little lean-to annex attached. There is no neutral movements of gold bullion in these nations. (Still) nothing seems to beat it.

Peaking inside to see why there were always so many people in those little annexes, I finally discovered that gold remains a principal collateral on small and short-term loans in most of the developing world. Banks are keen to get at it, hold on to it if they can, and scratch high exchanges out of it in their own favour off the working classes. Individual holders of gold are keen to use it as collateral because they hold few other easily convertible, tangible assets. Banks have a hard time liquidating spare pigs, cows, or chickens. It all looked and smelled like loan-sharking. Rings, baubles, beads, and chains, all being scratched and scored, weighed and chemically tested for purity, all a regular part of local credit union plans. Only part valuations are given on such pawn-like arrangements. But truly those little annexes were always the busiest departments in any of the banks I visited in the rural areas of that region of the world.

Countries like India also exemplify the issues of gold as trades and currency-based commodity exchange for centuries. So many cultures, so many languages, so many potential reasons to disagree on the values of trade currencies and commodities prices. So many extralegal markets. Too true. But not only because of a desire to evade the law. An area where microcredit really should steal the show. But most banks seem to like things as they are. If every business community somehow lived on a Pacific atoll then everyone there could easily agree that shiny small shells, particulary rare, or especially exclusive agates or pebbles might act as a trade currency agreed by all. Not so in a world of discord, comparative advantages, disadvantages,languages, and cultures. So I began to read a little about gold. The most interesting fact? It reached its highest recorded monetary value in a day of speculatorial madness. It was the day Columbus returned to Spain and told all that there was an entire other continent out there waiting to be pillaged (Sorry. Discovered?). It rose to somewhere in the region of five thousand US dollars an ounce on that day.

By Roman times, currencies had evolved highly from the concept of carrying around large stone wheels on sticks. One of my old buddies is a rabid coin collector and Classics MA. His penchant was holding and still hoarding a coin from each of the Emperor's reigns. My idea of collecting gold was much more immediately tangible. I prefer Swiss assayed and registered gold ounces. For a period of about seven months I accumulated my gold horde. And stopped. I think that is when I started studying business. I bought in to the real deal at around 250 USD an ounce. Not for any reason other than a desire to have that shiny gold stuff around. Maybe it would come in handy some day? It certainly has doubled in value in three years. My own prediction on gold prices from 2003 can be confirmed with a certain Investor's Group salesman in the Annapolis Valley. I told him the stuff would hit 500 within two years. And it did. Sometimes research is really on the ground, not on a trading floor, not in a bank. Sometimes research can be an accumulated revelatory process, like a tangible asset of the mind panned from real world experiences. This may also be the first time I have offered such a nugget of a mere suggestion that what I have gathered, worked over, and written here does not exclusively originate from the reading of good books.

For the Europeans at the turn of the century, gold was causing real problems for current accounts balances. Global currencies were mushrooming due to local London and continental exchange markets, and the US banking industry, the growth cycle, all were putting serious stresses on international gold reserves management. Like the little assayers (with pinching fingers) of India or China today, banks could only issue national currencies for international exchange if their valuations were guaranteed by comparable holdings in gold. It was like a guarantee for speculators and traders to use paper currency. The more business transactions they did, the larger the scale of their trade, the larger their billfolds grew, the greater numbers of transactions across national borders, the more numerous the bank reserves exchanges. Basically, gold could not keep up with the shifts of liquidity which a boom in international imports and exports from increasingly distant lands demanded.

In the early 1920s Germany was having real difficulty forging a recovery and stabilizing currency exchange according to Aldcroft. Inflation rates were a double edged sword. On one hand it encouraged capital investment but also impacted upon production and real wages. One solution to the problem was to assess taxes on terms of gold because currency valuations were so unstable. This is also an issue in China and India today because in the first case, currency exchange rates are artificially maintained by government fiat. Furthermore many Chinese, probably most Chinese are prevented from speculating on their own currency. It is like rent control. In the second case, currency speculation has been India's bane for decades. One would expect a stronger, tighter managerial grip on that one. All the time, at the ground level, in all cases, gold seems to find an exchange valuation which is not always at posted rates. It floats on localized demands and dimensions. It is much more reasonably a reflection of true valuations in such cases.

Collectively the Europeans sought to stabilize currency exchanges, it was in their interest considering their debt loads and who they had to pay, each other, and their Big Brother. Aldcroft details national efforts in France. The French increased taxes to boost federal revenues, lowering public capital spending, and began to fund its debt load. Aldcroft notes that Europeans long disagreeing, enough to fight the largest war ever, now agreed that the solution to currencies restabilisations would be a return to the gold standard. Mostly long on pomp, short on cirumstances arrangements. Post-war gold standards were not fully supported by bullion reserves. An agreed to design on a cart without the horses was an agreed upon solution.

Many nations simply substituted the shiny stuff for foreign exchange currencies. Aldcroft submits that 42% of total national reserves in 1927 were composed of foreign currencies compared to around 12% in 1913. This made sense at the time, it still makes sense to many today. But this was not just a transition away from bullion, it was a closer approximation of debt and creditor linkages, responsibilites to which appear almost old school, which existed post-war and were a result of over-nationalisation of economies prior to the war. A collective financial mea culpa? Competition among markets was nationally-based, and more linear in 1913. All of a sudden a new reality of foreign reserves made sense because a whole number of new payments and exchanges needed to be made.

These new linkages provided new currents and streams for competitive interest rates and exchange rates, so higher volatility flows now existed, which in turn put new stresses upon sterling and dollar gold reserves. Many of these reserves had effectively been accumulated through the emptying of net-debtor European gold bullion reserves, filtered out to pay interests and debt loads payments. Aldcroft mentions the word "pyramids" (insert "schemes") to explain how short-term debts with high interest rates began to be the sole support for outstanding long term war debts. Foreign currencies could then be held to stabilize local currency as a faster flowing method to curb sharp appreciations or depreciations in national currencies.

However every nation was buying and selling at the same time; net benefits of buying and selling foreign exchange were at times hard to discern. Everytime a crackling national fire was put out another to start elsewhere because of insufficient management of the local economic pillars on the loads. Micro-cracking of the entire system bled it from the inside from the beginning of its reorganisation. It is as if no dead load requirements had been placed on the structure of the gold standard during this period.

So the gold standard collapsed fantastically in the 1930s as Aldcroft describes. The net movement of gold out of bullion reserves in Europe had mostly bypassed London and headed straight to New York to directly service debt. These currencies still represented the option to exchange currencies for gold convertibility versus foreign currency exchanges which were proving a crapshoot anyway. But US dollars were well insured by that gold. So as European currencies were heavily traded, their collective control shifted clearly over international currency exchange trading from London to New York.

Naturally because the US dollar was supported by more gold. It was now more secure as a defacto global currency, not only because of the gold. Aldcroft reveals that in the rush to stabilize, several nations perpetuated parity rates which bore no connection to reality in exchange rates and currency values. There was no purchasing power parity among nations, no comparative indexing. Thus there were no real debts payments parities. No deflations could take place in nations, such as Britain, where high unemployment rates demanded higher inflation rates.

So gold flowed out of most nations and into a glittering few. By the end of the 1920s 65% of the world's gold was held in the United States, France, and European neutral states according to Aldcroft (Insert Switzerland). Up from 54% in 1913. Also up were their effective controls of currencies exchange markets, mostly stealing the wind from Old Order British sails. This is reflected in British proportions of assets to liabilities, which grew to four times debt to equity. Which represented the greatest liabilities and the smallest gold reserves in any exchange currency market. Inappropriately fixed exchange rates, a result of a failure to adequately implement a gold standard recovery would implicate a perennially discussed fall. 1929.

Part Two "Rusty Prizes": The European Economy 1914-2000 (Recovery/Instability)

Review Part Two "Rusty Prizes": The European Economy 1914-2000 (Recovery/Instability) Derek H. Aldcroft (2002)

That the 1920's represented a difficult, partial, and particularist recovery process should be no great surprise considering the economic failure mechanisms which had been put in place; the peace treaties themselves made recovery basically impossible. It was a period of about seven years, or until 1925 according to Aldcroft, before spikey prewar levels of production could be reached.


Of most outstanding impediments to recovery, it is a paradox that Britain itself apparently provided the greatest examples of post-war economic reconstruction difficulties. This is particularly noteworthy, considering that Britain was not facing a widespread loss of economic plant or comparative population losses at all comparable to Germany, France, or Russia. Britain's stumbling blocks consisted of currency exchange difficulties, which implicated all European nations, some of the worst labour strikes in history, and a lack of capital financing on national or international borrowing capacities. The coffers were quite empty. Furthermore, Britain accented the rising regional issues of increases in European populations, but these without an accompanying strength of industrial development to provide meaningful employment.



All serious effects which may be attributed to nearly thirty years of war preparations and build-ups; also quite acute signs of future German economic spheres of influence in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. During this period inflation, coupled to exchange depreciations at times encouraged investments and exports, of which German companies were in the forefront of capitalisation in Eastern/Central Europe. Aldcroft notes that the earliest solutions for these countries were based more on developing industrial capacities rather than increasing rates of output. However by the late 1920s most countries were well on the road to surpassing previous indices set prior to the war. In particular, France and Belgium. But all of this supposed recovery was obviously of greatest interest to the claw-like benefactors. And thus one must examine what Aldcroft has to say about war reparations in this regard.

Among twenty eight involved countries, the largest debtors were: Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium. Germany was possessed by eleven creditors, the UK represented seventeen debtors, France had ten to her name, all beholding and combined to sixteen US debtors. The total inter-Allied debts amounted to 26.5 billion in 1920s dollars, it would be beyond my scope to estimate what that value would be in today's dollars.


But let's look at a comparative price index on ocean liners. The Queen Mary Two recently cost 800 million dollars to set to float. The RMS Olympic cost (in 1911 dollars) US 7.5 million to weld together. An unadjusted for inflation dollar cost increase of 106.67 times repeating if one assumes perception of value would be as most luxurious, expensive boat afloat in comparative periods. I get a number on that war debt equalling 28.27 trillion dollars in a simple current comparison. Any economists out there wishing to torpedo such comparisons are welcome to do so, as long as they give me a real dinghy in return to place here. Please do. Welcome most welcome. On unadjusted values, read that India's GDP will amount to 28 trillion dollars, perhaps, in 2020 if all goes less chaotic. (http://www.iitk.ac.in/ime/MBA_IITK/avantgarde/Archive/economic.htm)

May it simply be a laymen's understanding then that the combined total of the First War debts were simply the largest whopping collection of debts ever amassed. For this there really requires no comparisons. Aldcroft discusses the appropriateness of expecting such debts to be repaid. Especially since Germany's economy was fairly moribund and flopsy during this entire recovery period, and every year of strict reparations dues implicated higher likelihood of spectacular default. The US is blamed for refusing to the mixing of the war debts and claims into unified, thus accountable streams. Think, "Oil for Food". Thus each creditor was obliged to serve the often hard to book octopus tentacles of various debtor associations and spare change collectors. There was a pickpocket with legitimate claims on every corner. And a Gulliver-like German economy appeared apparently tethered down among the houyhnhnms with fairly loose bindings.

By the late 1920s US banks lending policies were heavily curtailed, as their efforts to collect, as if one could really bleed wine from stones, US banks appeared to encourage their debtors to simply incur more debt, also to US bank benefits, in all joining in the fancily fronted attempt at seemingly successfully swallowing of their own slithery collective financial tails. Thus increasing proportions of large, suspiciously European liabilities in various trenches and tranches of short-term, thus immensely higher interests debt loads. These were simply less than innovative reinventions of the tying up of various clambering lizards in their own chameleon of utter financial ruin in Europe, and foreshadowing the dooms of immediate, depression inducing recalls. This completely avoidable process might have been forestalled according to one writer of anecdotal repute whose name, while I cannot recall it, would add little to his argument. What if every European nation had simply said no to reparations? His question. The financial crisis of 1929 according to Aldcroft was debtors' reparations being seemingly paid out for by further debtors' loans to diverse, scrambling, crowding creditors.


It seems in hindsight that had the reparations committees in the US been headed perhaps by any other character, other than the sloth-like decision-making procedural sponge-wringing policies of General Dawes the Nobel Prize for Peace might have been for a peace which lasted more than a dozen years. His military genius may be credited for extending loan payment plans in the early 1920's but also with the economic albatross of non-reduction of outstanding reparations. As a mind-boggling array of greedy creditors were pushing Germany for as much as they could get considering their victorious reparations obligations, these also played a significant role in forcing the German banking systems to further indebt themselves to US international lending agencies. All appeared filled with these arrangements for far too long. The only sane economist appears to have been Owen D. Young of the American camps who proposed capital demands be reduced. But even the best bankers often do not listen even to the sanest of economists. By 1931, Hoover appears to finally have decided to press the panic button in a proposed moratorium on reparations, but only for the penniless Germans, and not their own Allies. Of course by this time, the pyramidine racket had already pitched most of its finest speculators off of their own pinnacles, into depths provoked mostly by their own collective greedy choices.


The Germans themselves appear to have literally bled themselves dry in the process of serving the debt loads of their losses. German borrowings are drawn by Aldcroft as evidence of this, a total of 28 billion marks in loans from international lenders, as Germans had broken all of their piggies already. Of this total 10.3 billion marks were paid out into reparations. But where did the 17.7 billion marks remainder go? Thus the Germans appeared to have various ways of squirreling away a little for a rainy day, which was soon coming. Of course not before the events of 1929. But it is nice to get ahead of the story a little, as the Germans appear to have gotten ahead more than a little prior to the crash, which mandated borrowing and payments methods appear to have encouraged.

Better than any case study...

Holding Corporations Accountable: Corporate Conduct, International Codes, and Citizen Action
Judith Richter (2002)

Read this to gain a pretty clear understanding of the global scope of challenges in the areas of MNC CSR.

Impossible to put down...

Impossible to put down...

Loung Ung wrote her entire miserable experience in an attempt to fully heal herself from the overwhelming and amazing loss of the lives of her loved ones, her neighbours and friends, and effectively her entire world.

This is a very heavy book to read and reminds one once again the absolute blessings that so many of us receive and rarely appreciate. It would be advised to read "The Killing Fields First", maybe see the movie as well first, to get some sort of understanding of the compassion required of the author for her account.

I believe her healing is real and a concrete example of the occasional triumph of the human spirit, for the benefit of all.

Great read, great story...

Great read, great story...

Jamling Tenzing Norgay writes a fascinating book about his life and the challenge of following in his father's footsteps...all the way to the top of Mt. Everest.

The best communication that this book accomplishes is in providing an insight and deep, personal look into the lives of Sherpas and their faith, and the developments of causes and effects relevant to the growth in climbing expeditions to their culture and society.

Also this book illustrates that the primal motivations inherent in the desire to risk life and limb to climb precipitous peaks and crags has a wide range of spiritual connotations and is perhaps more culturally specific than usually thought.

All of these climbers have their own personal motivations for being up there, the Sherpas themselves are more closely connected perhaps spiritually, as well as professionally.

Recommended alternative readings, particularly, "Into Thin Air" are relevant for the context of the 1996 disaster. "K-2: the Savage Mountain" also would provide a good discussion of ill-prepared and ill-planned climbing expeditions and the tragic results. "Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine " also provides more details into earlier expeditions prior to Tenzing Norgay's first ascent with Edmund Hillary.

Finally, the open debate and kerfuffle over who exactly placed the first step on the summit (Tenzing or Edmund) made for an interesting discussion of a controversial issue which was new information to me, as well as the debate over whether Tenzing Norgay was representing Nepal, or India on his climb.

These were interesting pieces of new information to add to a fascinating puzzle of overlapping information about Everest which Jamling Tenzing Norgay has well provided. However I will have to read the credits again to establish what exactly the "ghost-writer" may have written...

The Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking
Iris Chang (1997)
This book will define for a reader the differences between official and unofficial, thus extrinsic and intrinsic cross-cultural values in the area of historical accounting.

Review (Part One: End of the Old Order): The European Economy 1914-2000 (4th Edition)

Review of: The European Economy 1914-2000 (4th Edition)
Derek H. Aldcroft (2001)

Upon beginning this blog format, one must discuss the reading of books one at a time, and the letting of them rest a long time, possibly too long to write lengthly reviews, encourages returns for further and repeat readings which encourages multi-part writings. In the last month or so, with more time, this reading process has changed. Certain books have taken "on and off" values. Like an intersection of traffic signals, with regular flow rates and turns-taking. A rotating through of a wonderful buffet of books, much as one returns for courses or platefuls of food.

However, as a result the mind becomes an increasingly interesting and pliable creature. It appears to retain those points which it most desires to discuss, in this frame of reference "review" maybe, because at some subconscious perspective, it has its own destination on consolidating the learning. Writing upon economic highlights so highlights again and attempts to shade-in necessary but limited details to accent them. As far as is required, the mind is composed of memories embedded in long and short term formats. When reading, one is able often to at times note those moments when clearly, diverse topics of choice are pulling their patterns and inferences independently of and freely from previously difficult straining or highly concentrating attempts at learning in the seeking of making those connections. Writing often simply just pours out.

So gathering more confidence in the process itself lends the idea that diffusiveness of reading has its own ultimate benefit. In the pouring out of writing. In knowing what needs to be written and what is left still to be read. And a title like "The European Economy 1914-2000" Derek H. Aldcroft (2001) has an initial impression of great dryness, or an empty decanter, for the average reader it might require much watering or at least some entertaining and enlightening attempts at detailing the dowsing rod in such a book. Business is a topic taken out of enlightened self-interest. It has its patterns, like a river, it has occupied the interests of the human condition perhaps since neanderthals or some-such discovered the makings of wine from rotting grapes falling within tree stumps. Perhaps they were simply apeing the monkeys in formenting like commodities. So a hundred years past is not so simian and perhaps more palatable, thus infinitely more relevant.

Continued review of this period prior to or around 1880 as a fulcrum of sorts is a pattern of useful business study. It reveals the modern world's first defined experience with the directions to which the interventing past up to the present has been provoking itself ever since. The capitalist. There is a total, permanent separation between rural and urban culture in most developed societies starting from this period, and the shifting of the balance between skilled and unskilled from one extreme to the other, from hayseed to suit, the welding of financing to process manufacturing, technology, and decades of production being driven into the dusts of war. Furthermore, it is useful to address the economic preparations and results of the full financing of technologically derived destruction of much of Western Europe, not once, but twice in short succession. Antimony and greed were both rainmakers and rainmade.

Aldcroft essentially serves such interests, and provides the details necessary to pinpoint the key dynamics of economics which propelled Europe into its first greatest destruction. It was my father's library from which I first read, as the first growth of the US was the source of its European parents losses, his interests as a history major were mostly the Second World War Period, a period with which his generation, that born near the end, but prior to the boom, was often perplexed with. Immense losses. That which I dabbled with in my own chosen library was English Literature which illustrated almost as detailed studies however narrowly, within the great creative works of the language, but with richly patterned and symbolic details, as close respectful relationships to each of the beauties of a peacock's feathers might appear to an appreciator as they are remaining on the living bird.


Such was what was lost. So a colouring of the mind with the realms of the cultural aspects of English Literature in Canada, America, and England, much leading up to 1880 out of pure intellectual pleasure is also useful for bringing vitality to economics. So it is logical that economics is taken on fancy flights at times, it is the rebar bridge of accountability which links a couple of fairly amateurish knowledge columns, fairly incomplete understandings in discreetly contrastive but complimentary disciplines. It is best to note the caps and the luxuries of imagination the world has destroyed in seeking to compartmentalize and structure its societies and occupational knowledge requirements so closely as economics does dictate for most individuals today. There has been a great narrowing of individual perspectives from what was thought generally in the 1880s, though far more people are better off today it appears one can know less of use generally, and thus be easily more encapsulated and manipulated upon what may have once been a wider landscape-type of understanding of the world. The canvas was integrated for readers and writers to all enjoy and commune regularly in general but in more complex thus intellectually stimulating manners of personal enrichment when interest was enough, and expertise was reserved for working affairs. At least nowadays more people can read and write. More people are free. There are fewer gravely poor. More people have the opportunity to freely capitalize? It was a time of which I have read. It was a time of great hope and promise. Even among the desperately poor. I believe successful societies must possess a collective hope and promise. But it was blind.


Aldcroft details that the end of this old order, that which existed as it may be read about indirectly, was the period of 1914-1921. Through the ramping and bolting up of their foreign lending and market capitalization industries, North America and Oceania (mostly Australia, but remember the colonials) are noted to have exceeded North Western Europe in terms of incomes per capita as of 1913. It was a mere thirty years of standardization of production which accomplished this, along with fledgling formations of trade unionism, implementations of shaky minimum work standards which had paralleled and preceeded this dynamic shift. The fact was that the US domestic economy was in itself demonstrating sufficient economies of scale to provision the capital and currency to lend to the Europeans, vast sums, much remaining unpaid today, but to purchase products it had effectively given the US the power to exploit three times over (and more) as fuel for war escalations. This took decades to prepare for economically.

It was as if an instantaneous conversion of the entire Eastern North American forests and farmlands and tranquil ponds had been moulded directly into industrial driven power-plants as seen in many Asian nations for the last decades, and with the ready railroads, every one horse-town all the way to California as well. The American working public was increasing productivity at a faster rate than any nation in history had ever done before, than even its European trade partners, consumers, and first financers. Thus disposable income increased incredibly. Overnight. In a period of under thirty years. Every derivative and subsidiary industry in North America suddenly lit up like a casino jackpot one-armed bandit winner, with bells ringing and lights flashing. For over two decades. All of North America and Oceania became Las Vegas.


But so too developed the complex issues of income distribution that can be observed currently, the percentages of wealth held by the rich and investor class. In 1913, 18% of the world's population controlled 62% of the world's wealth. In only a hundred years, that proportion has increased in concentration. Half as many people again now control more. But at no time previous or since the Age of Aldcroft's Old Order did a greater proportion of US manufacturing production and commodities exit their domestic economy, as combined with proportional US financing of European loans to purchase and pay for all of that export growth. US consumption had still not caught up with its production capacities. In the case of consumption, this is also the case in China's margins for potential profit today.

Many economists are not very professionally concerned about the ethical consequences of such asset redistribution, or the direct losses accrued in human populations due to the effects of such economic gains from a humane or fire-fighting outlook. They often appear more like fire starters. Nothing propelled the world's first major global growth cycle like preparations and profits for war could. Thus statistics for war-time population losses are only numbers on a page to many economists. Human losses were highest in Germany and Russia in this period. Their combined tolls account for 22-24 million souls. Aldcroft admits that this was nearly 7% of the entire population of Europe but that it only effected industry losses in efficency in Germany and not Russia, as it was still a primarily agrarian economy where human losses were extreme but no fixed assets existed to be destroyed or removed from production.


Yet this was combined a total elimination of natural population increases in Europe for the entire duration of the war period, something which would later impact upon its regional ability to build its own economies of scale for domestic consumption and export growth. Necessary if it sought to reduce US imports, the demand for which it had created but not through increased consumer consumption or income per capita gains. It is a concurrent, coincidental statistic of the period 1914-1919. It was as if for the first time in the record of humanity, an economic snapshot had been erased completely the moment it was taken, on the economic principles of snapshot-like gathering of data indicators. That is, data is only an indicator of current situations, much as a photograph is contextualized for a moment in terms of economic time, or a sample useful for compiling sets of data at this very moment alone.

In this case it was also the first time that economists could calculate human capital losses under the auspices of gross capital losses, a century before businesses even began calculating employees as intangible assets. And these capital losses were then also concurrent with another economic coincidence. These economists could calculate losses on income yielding property, fixed assets, bricks and mortar at three to four years of normal growth rates of return. Again nearly concurrent to the duration of the war period. Aldcroft notes of these details with precision.

It was as if a triple punch had impacted the totality of European economics without even considering their future dues, reparations, loans or interests accrued on outstanding debts, real losses, borrowed from the same people they had purchased their war materials and commodities from. Collectively allies and axis powers had guaranteed the failure of their locally potential future competitive advantages in three ways for another thirty years, the next thirty years, not including the fact that they did it again fifteen years later despite warnings from a certain tall, but obviously forlorn, British jester of an economist. His name starts with the letter after "J". Probably no other economist in history ever spent as much time contemplating Yorick's skull waiting for someone, anyone, to get the point.

First, they had diverted nearly thirty years of economic gains away from capital investment and growth locally to the US for the sake of scale of bulk savings in per unit costs. Second, through import purchases of mostly US products these liquid assets potentially useful for start-up in Europe and domestic increases in production and consumption capacities were prevented from ever taking place as those assets were spent in the US. Third, dynamic income per captia increases could never be realized because the natural population growth required to increase domestic production and capacity as well as consumption and productivity had been erased with the very products which would cost them in excess of sixty years of collective lost liquid capital and market share virtually given away to their competitors. Who now effectively owned them.

The majority of the economic capacities (bricks and mortar) losses were concentrated in France and Belgium, vast portions of which were simply levelled. The total costs of the five year war, combined, exceeded the expenditures to a total of 6.5 times the total western European collective national debts of every country therein, from the end of the 18th Century to the end of The Great War.


This period of approximately two decades was the largest total economic loss up to that date in the history of human existence. It was a first. And in its being first it was last. The empty motto, "Never Again" really did mean "Never Again" but only in the fact that such a total economic loss could indeed only ever happen first once.

Every single, solitary loss of even a single sous, was multipled through accounting principles of a sous today infinitely being worth more than a sous tomorrow, compounded over and over to the present day. At least Aldcroft writes well enough economically for the realization that this old order had truly ended far earlier than many may even realize. The seeds of the end of the old order were completely determined by its outset and its aims. Blindness. Capitalist innocence?

The rainmakers were European buyers of virtually everything, credited to the seller. The sellers were the rainmade. The North Americans and Oceania. And so far they have been so made ever since. It was the greatest capital shift in history and it only took twenty years, about a century before free currency exchange even ever came (roughly) into existence. And it happened because both camps agreed it was culturally inevitable and economically necessary.

On Chieftans, Thingmen, Feastings and Sagas: Viking Age Iceland (Part Two)

On Chieftans, Thingmen, Feastings and Sagas: Viking Age Iceland (Part Two) Viking Age Iceland (Jesse Byock)

Byock quickly informs on the hot topic here, early Icelandic cultural development highlights its uniqueness among its warmer, European mainland cousins, aside from the severity of environmental conditions. Its Scandanavian settlers, replete with polar constitutions were not unaccustomed to the brusqueness of brutal winters, thus these easily carved warm nests into their miens, although out of a scantily provisioned homeland. Mother Hubbard's cupboard probably could not compare to what these settlers found to embrace as pioneers on a true semi-frozen island in the stream. What seems to startle at first makes sense upon deliberation.


These hardy Vikings were highly deliberate, and fair-minded peoples, with well thought out, well organized, simplified people management methods for conducting themselves collectively and equitably. For supposed fierce barbarians, which they were perceived to be by their prey-like cousins, or simply as successful warriors, which they were, in an age of several fearsome war-like European clans, no less should be expected of the efficient Viking. Those hordes of populous, rich, fattened, easy coastal opportunties which arose on many occasions beneath their monstrous fores were doubtlessly impossible to resist as quick and easy pickings, as easy and as quick as several major Icelandic business takeovers on the mainland of late.


Now instead of running from fire breathing dragons Europeans are merged and acquiesced upon the snappings of Landsbanki and its affiliated parties, the gobblings and feastings of Kaupthing Bunardarbanki, the ravenousness of Baugur, the antics and dealings of Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson, the rapacious joustings of Bakkavor, the flanking of the winged valkyrie which was once the drone of Icelandair, dazed Europeans left gawking at the infamous goings on concerning Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson and the Hafskip Fiasco. These Vikings prove in their descendants that their boiling bloods are alive and well on the financial fronts. These peerless navigators of winds, sun, and stars were comfortably at home when at home, among their own fully liberal in government, mightily staid and placid, and their medieval social framework was as strong, clearly as stolid as their literary records appear to be, embodied in lengthly, numerous, even at times monotonous, family sagas.

It all began with a man named Mord in Njal's Saga. He was also called Fiddle. He is Iceland's first and foremost: Chieftain. And he was considered great not because he was a warrior, but because he was...a lawyer. This creature reviled in all other great civilisations, yet boosted to the top rung of a rigid cultural ladder among the Vikings. James Bryce is quoted by Byock that Iceland, "...produced a Constitution unlike any other whereof records remain, and a body of law so elaborate and complex that it is hard to believe that it existed among men whose chief occupation was to kill one another." At least it proved regulated, which cannot be said for much global financial fracas in the current incendiary business age.


The chieftain or godi was purely a political leader, as there were no organized police forces for almost the first five hundred years of settlement, his authority was limited, but something most Maritimers feel perhaps familiar with, as one prefers the police only when one requires them, thus among moral village-based societies there is little need. Farmers and their herds had no clear limitations or privileges to limited resources, indicative of fair-minded sharing, and during disputes, resolutions of these freeholders, called bondr were organized according to the chiefs representatives into councils called thingmen. These thingmen were arranged and shared interests in maintaining peaceable relations and one's good graces constitued the quality of being "in thing" with the godi. Any minion office worker can relate to the benefit of being "in thing" with the boss, many accomplish it through prodigious ass-kissing or more concerning godis like Sai Baba for example. Similarly there appears no terminology for "out thing". It seems fairly obvious there was logically only ever one position available in terms of thingmen. The godi role in Icelandic society was descendant from old Norse concepts of priestly, god-like leadership (Hence an Indian self-appointed godi as an example). Imagine a Thor-like character perhaps embodied with probable god-like reverance. Fawning obedience. The Vikings were agreeable, I can imagine them smiling much together and working things out to keep everyone "in thing" rather than snarling or dying over petty disagreements. Definitely these early residents of Iceland knew any concept of "out thing" would be a bad thing.

Of Chaucer, Chichevache and The Question: Chaucer On Women (Part Four)

Of Chaucer, Chichevache and The Question:

Chaucer On Women (Part Four)

"O noble wives, full of high prudence,
Let no humility your tongues nail:
Nor let no clerk have cause or diligence
To write of you a story of such marvail,
As of Griselda patient and kind,
Lest Chichevache you swallow in her entrail."
(Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales)



"Since [in the Middle Ages] the psychic relation to woman was expressed in the collective worship of Mary, the image of woman lost a value to which human beings had a natural right. This value could find its natural expression only through individual choice, and it sank into the unconscious when the individual form of expression was replaced by a collective one. In the unconscious the image of woman received an energy charge that activated the archaic and infantile dominants. And since all unconscious contents, when activated by dissociated libido, are projected upon the external object, the devaluation of the real woman was compensated by daemonic features. She no longer appeared as an object of love, but as a persecutor or witch. The consequence of increasing Mariolatry was the witch hunt,that indelible blot on the later Middle Ages." (Psychological Types, C.G. Jung: 1921)



Anyone who wonders what mysogyny, chichevache, witches, and anima might have in common might do well to read my little discussion on the question. I have found no images revealing chichevache, merely descriptions of her as a reputed mythical, legendary beast of yore, fabled to feast upon good women. That this loathsome chichevache is described as having a cow-like body and a human face, but perpetually starved to skin and bone in appearance, supposedly due to the scarcity of good women, is a foreshadowing of the discussion here to follow. May one assume thus that chichevache is an actual, supernatural entity for the time being.

With manly voice, so that all the court heard it:
"My liege lady, without exception," he said,
"Women desire to have sovereignty
As well over her husband as her love,
And to be in mastery above him.
This is your greatest desire, though you kill me.
Do as you please; I am here subject to your will."
In all the court there was not wife, nor maid,
Nor widow that denied what he said,
But said that he was worthy to have his life.
(Chaucer, The Wife of Bath's Tale)

Chichevache has a contrasted counterpart, the bycorn or bicorn in mythology, stuffed and swollen to excess by the consumption of obedient and kind husbands reputed to be larger in numbers. Chaucer does not apparently remind the reader of the bicorn, some things are needlessly said. That these traditional balances in delivery of Middle Ages bogeymen (or cow women) appears slightly skewed in favour of obedient and kind males points to the obvious bones of contention. Chaucer was and is perceived a male chauvinist by feminists. But like many pigs, he has redeeming qualities worthy of review and worthy of note, as all obedient and kind men do, even as all women do, feminist or not. Chaucer shares perspectives and facets of his intelligence in the matters of women. That he consumes much time in the writing about rather than the chasing of women was obviously a boon to his wife and he was only historically charged with rape once in his life. During The Hundred Years War.

So I have jumped to Chapter 15 in concordance with non-linear patterns of learning and perhaps to startle chichevache into revealing more than a rattling, bony shadow of an appearance here. I would love for her to have a full satisfying meal. It is my favourite chapter of West's treatise, and it deals in great balance with The Wife of Bath, Women, and Marriage and proves true that man may not exceed in any subject so greatly as in his discussion of women rather than in his actual knowledge of or experience of them, which paradoxically appears to remain of great benefit to gluttonous bicorn. West is right to highlight that feminist views of Chaucer have altered over time from, "All good women are to Chaucer reflections of the Virgin Mary..." (Burrel, 1908) to, "...the masculine or misogynist aspects of Chaucer's writing are undeniable." (Laskya, 1995). So a hundred years or so means much in feminist evolutionary tastes for Chaucer. Chaucer has not changed unless he has a ghost-writer. I have to admit then, that my favourite female English Literature Teacher, Miss Joyce Balfour, must be some hold over to Victorian times, even though one would never know it from her mini-skirts and fine, shapely legs, one might also perceive her simply to be a most graceful feminist. Regardless, my young impressionable mind was never taught or trained to disdain Chaucer's literature or the teaching of it, and I would confess any knowledge of lurking misogynies there to priests, not feminists. However I was taught to venerate the Virgin Mary, which I continue to do.

Perhaps Chaucer sought in many ways to define simple paradoxies and similarities between high-minded, career-driven prioresses and prostitutes. Certainly they may not have matched his perspectives on women, those he may have accorded to his anima courtesy of Jung's theory on subconscious archetypes. But through the Tale of Melibeus, expressions of any surprises about the discovery of patient, gentle, kind women in a world seemingly haunted by chichevache may only highlight ages old customs of over-dramatics for the purposes of comedy, recitation and spectacle. Poems such as Chaucer's could not have enjoyed such a popular following without parodies and oral renditions of parts and parcels of his work played out in front of audiences and among friends or families. Are you hearing any rattling bones by the way? Far too few English were literate to sit around reading thus many perhaps retained fireside skills of renditioning, entertaining, and reciting, simply out of an interest in after work or dark entertainments. Any starving cows lurking around at the moment? As West accounts, communal perception of what fun-making is has changed irreperably, so much so, that at times one might think that laughter or foolishness should be hidden away in these contemporary times, the sense of humour of English societies has suffered greatly the true bones of chichevache in this regard.



That English Lords and Ladies also enjoyed traipsing around London in their latest stolen French fashions, stolen off the dead or ransomed backs of their enemies, those simply eeking out a living on lands more bountiful, or that fantastically, most English were wool carders, shearers, shepherds, or similar simple folk, labouring ceaselessly upon the farms is easily lost in a history of changing perceptions. The Virgin Mary, herself a shepherd's wife implicates Chaucer's choice of audience if he indeed was first meeting the entertainment of his own anima.

One may ask anyone who has lived upon a farm, whether a married woman there is not accorded her full share of family rights, as she shoulders her heavy share, particularly in family and farming duties. That no women are more accorded the opportunity to laugh at absurd dispositions and humour-loving dispositions than those of farming wives is difficult to imagine, especially wives amused at the most apparent absurdities of high-minded women who might not know a needle about family matters or the tending of the living foods for her family. Most women (and men by the way) of Chaucer's Age were simply scraping by and earning a hard living, or supporting children at least those lucky to escape death in the cradle. Humour for such women is and was the redemption of their hard duties and frequent butter-boxes. It appears clear Chaucer was painting a particular type of woman to be the butt of his jokes, for a highly appreciative, highly specific audience, the most appreciative audience probably being mostly farming women.



Then enters Christine de Pisan, a contemporary feminist of Chaucer's Age, who due to her paid employment as a Court Poet to the King of France is considered a turn-coat to modern-day feminists. Reality sets on these issues to say that chichevache appears never to have been so hungry as among modern day feminists in their perspectives on Christine de Pisan, and contemporary swelling of bicorn for their benefit in the meantime. It should be enough for them that she was one of them, condemned in her time and compared to the Greek prostitute who criticized Theophrastus no less. An obvious proof of her power to provoke scorn and derision. If that is not enough proof of her feminist-ness then truly what is or could ever be? How could one reconcile an anima of Virgin Mary purity with feminists burning their bras and at that in a far more Puritan time anyway?



Chaucer's character of The Wife of Bath is almost embodied by a Russian classical pianist I once knew in Abu Dhabi. A statuesque, noble carriage of a woman, experienced in love, and having had five husbands, an expert in the ways of men, women, and marriage. A woman equally at ease tinkling the ivories of a man's ear or delightfully feeding the finest, freshest unsalted Caspian caviars to her favourite hound at the dinner table instead. Their likenesses, a character to be heeded at all times, perhaps in excess to that of friars, nuns, or preachers for obvious knowledge of marriage beds. However that their dalliances were fairly free during their time little dulls obvious wisdom. The Wife of Bath cites her own interpretations upon various Old Testament passages in description of what she has learned of married life from each husband, including:

At least two husbands who were so old they could barely consummate their marriages. A fourth who was a lecher and kept a concubine. A fifth husband supposedly still alive who had punched her once, but only after she had torn a page from one of his books, supposedly misogynist authors such as St. Jerome, Boccaccio, or Jean de Meun.
The thought of this fifth husband, Jankin, is recounted by West as provoking Alison's invectives against celibate priests having no right to comment upon her affairs. As West relates, The Wife of Bath appears to have some clearly modern thoughts on marriage, namely that she sees it as, "a license to exploit and dominate men". The following exchanges of the Friar, the Host, Harry Baily, the Clerk do not wholey deal with a debate upon matrimony, and move to the Merchant's Tale, the loveless marriage of May and January, or a young girl and an old man. West notes that David Wright claims that Chaucer is the only poet in the English language to, "treat marriage (as distinct from love) seriously and at length in poetry."

However, The Wife of Bath also highlighted by West is recounted as the messenger of Chaucer's perspective on rape. He was accused of it by Cecilia Champaign in 1380. The charge was settled in court and experts agree that 13th Century terminology would only define rape as violent and completed sexual intercourse. Chaucer apparently sold his home and cashed annuities to serve his settlement. West notes that a possible plausible explanation is posited by Derek Persall who suggests that concerning Cecilia, "...there are many things that it might more probably have been than physical rape, including neglect and the betrayal of promise by the man, or some unilateral decision on his part to terminate an affair that he regarded as over but which the woman in retrospect regarded as physical violation."

That the rapist in The Wife of Bath's Tale is one of King Arthur's knights is interesting, especially since she claims to prefer such, "lusty bachelor(s)". The knight is condemned to death for his crime, although in Chaucer's time it was merely a fine, however King Arthur's own Queen and attendants come to his rescue, giving him a year and a day to escape his judgement, by providing the answer to the most interesting of questions, "What thing is it that women most desiren?"

The knight spends a year hearing nonsense (at length as this quote from Project Gutenberg).

He sought in ev'ry house and ev'ry place,
Where as he hoped for to finde grace,
To learne what thing women love the most:
But he could not arrive in any coast,
Where as he mighte find in this mattere
Two creatures according in fere.
Some said that women loved best richess,
Some said honour, and some said jolliness,
Some rich array, and some said lust a-bed,
And oft time to be widow and be wed.
Some said, that we are in our heart most eased
When that we are y-flatter'd and y-praised.
He went full nigh the sooth, I will not lie;
A man shall win us best with flattery;
And with attendance, and with business
Be we y-limed, bothe more and less.
And some men said that we do love the best
For to be free, and do right as us lest,
And that no man reprove us of our vice,
But say that we are wise, and nothing nice,
For truly there is none among us all,
If any wight will *claw us on the gall,
That will not kick, for that he saith us sooth:
Assay, and he shall find it, that so do'th.
For be we never so vicious within,
We will be held both wise and clean of sin.
And some men said, that great delight have we
For to be held stable and eke secre,
And in one purpose steadfastly to dwell,
And not bewray a thing that men us tell.
But that tale is not worth a rake-stele.
Pardie, we women canne nothing hele,
Witness on Midas; will ye hear the tale?
Ovid, amonges other thinges smale
Saith, Midas had, under his longe hairs,
Growing upon his head two ass's ears;
The whiche vice he hid, as best he might,
Full subtlely from every man's sight,
That, save his wife, there knew of it no mo';
He lov'd her most, and trusted her also;
He prayed her, that to no creature
She woulde tellen of his disfigure.
She swore him, nay, for all the world to win,
She would not do that villainy or sin,
To make her husband have so foul a name:
She would not tell it for her owen shame.
But natheless her thoughte that she died,
That she so longe should a counsel hide;
Her thought it swell'd so sore about her heart
That needes must some word from her astart
And, since she durst not tell it unto man
Down to a marish fast thereby she ran,
Till she came there, her heart was all afire:
And, as a bittern bumbles in the mire,
She laid her mouth unto the water down
"Bewray me not, thou water, with thy soun'"
Quoth she, "to thee I tell it, and no mo',
Mine husband hath long ass's eares two!
Now is mine heart all whole; now is it out;
I might no longer keep it, out of doubt."
Here may ye see, though we a time abide,
Yet out it must, we can no counsel hide.
The remnant of the tale, if ye will hear,
Read in Ovid, and there ye may it lear.

Finally he meets up with an old witch who promises to tell him her secret as long as he will promise to obey her as a "toy boy". The crone then tells him he must agree to marry her for she has saved his life with the answer:

With manly voys, that al the court it herde:
"My lige lady, generally," quod he,
"Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee
As wel over hir housbond as hir love,
And for to been in maistrie hym above.
This is youre mooste desir, thogh ye me kille.
Dooth as yow list; I am heer at youre wille."
In al the court ne was ther wyf, ne mayde,
Ne wydwe that contraried that he sayde,
But seyden he was worthy han his lyf.



King Arthur's knight then resigns himself to the crone's bed but she continues to berate him for expecting to merit a woman of his own age or social class. Finally after delivering the knight of his arrogance she transforms herself into a young and beautiful woman. West traces possible origins of the answer, which I think offers some possible atonement for Chaucer's possible misdeeds to medieval folktales and the "Marriage of Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell" courtesy of Polly Young-Esiendrath.



But I also like to think that Carl Jung and his theories on anima, influenced Chaucer's choice of themes in The Wife of Bath's Tale much as the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets was also similarly difficult to at first identify with. So accordingly Chaucer might be misunderstood, and much of what feminists appear to be interpreting might have been better interpreted as his wrestling with his crone anima. So I will close with Jung's description of anima, and a short ode to my own theoretical anima, "My dear anima, if you are listening, I have been married to you all of these years, obediently and kindly, so hurry up and transform already! Chichevache really deserves a full meal for once!" Would it be too simple an explanation that most chauvinists might not have dealt with their anima just yet?
Yes, seven or eight hundred year old literary works of art do prove their value on occasion. Ask Chichevache!

"Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or 'archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man. Actually, we know from experience that it would be more accurate to describe it as an image of men, whereas in the case of the man it is rather the image of woman. Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion. I have called this image the "anima," and I find the scholastic question Habet mulier animam? especially interesting, since in my view it is an intelligent one inasmuch as the doubt seems justified. Woman has no anima, no soul, but she has an animus. The anima has an erotic, emotional character, the animus a rationalizing one. Hence most of what men say about feminine eroticism, and particularly about the emotional life of women, is derived from their own anima projections and distorted accordingly. On the other hand, the astonishing assumptions and fantasies that women make about men come from the activity of the animus, who produces an inexhaustible supply of illogical arguments and false explanations." (Marriage as a Psychological Relationship: Anima and Animus, C.J. Jung: 1925)

Chaucer: The Italian Connection (Part Three)

Chaucer: The Italian Connection (Part Three)

Richard West notes quizzically that Chaucer wrote nothing of his travels in Italy. He questions whether Chaucer was mindful of the writings of Boccaccio and critical studies of Dante and sought not to impinge upon similar territory. He notes Chaucer was selected by King Edward III for the journey following his diplomatic missions to Flanders, France and Spain along with two Genoese residents in England. However West also lets it be known that there is no concrete evidence that Chaucer ever had any knowledge of Italian contrary to reports by Chesterton. Chaucer's trade mission was to discuss issues pertinent to English export commodities of wool and cloth, with little evidence of his knowledge of cargo carrying or ports management which should not be expected anyway.

However Chaucer's borrowing of Dante's themes, in the Second Nun's Tale, the story of Ugolino in the Monk's Tale, the Parliament of Fowls, House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women, and the Nun's Priest's Tale often take on a deprecating humourous quality which reminds readers that he had tasted of the great classics such as Virgil, Ovid, Boethius, St. Bernard, and the Arthurian Romances. But his borrowings also extended to his contemporaries including Machaut, Deschamps, and Froissart.

Guillaume de Machaut (circa 1300-1377)

Probably educated in Reims, he entered the service of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, as a royal secretary, circa 1323. The king helped him to procure a canonry in Reims, which was confirmed in 1335; Machaut settled there circa 1340, although he continued in royal service until the king's death (1346). He then served various members of the French high nobiIity, including John, Duke of Berry, his later years being dedicated to the manuscript compilation of his works. (http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/machaut.html)

Eustache Deschamps

Also called MOREL, on account of his dark complexion; b. at Vertus in Champagne between 1338 and 1340; d. about 1410. After having finished his classical studies at the episcopal school of Reims, under the poet Guillaume de Marchault, who was a canon of Reims, he studied law at the University of Orléans. He then travelled for some time as the king's messenger in various parts of Europe, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt; in the last country, it is said, he was made a slave. On his return to France he was appointed gentleman-usher by Charles V, and was confirmed in his position by Charles VI, whom he accompanied in that capacity on various campaigns in Flanders.

His numerous poems, ballads, rondels, lays, and virelays are full of valuable information concerning the political and moral history of his time. He was an honest, religious man, and although a courtier was also a moralist who did not hesitate to condemn the injustice and wrongs that he had seen and experienced. His style is somewhat heavy, but it is vigourous and not lacking in grace. (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04748a.htm)

Jean Froissart

French historian and poet, b. at Valenciennes, about 1337, d. at Chimay early in the fifteenth century. The exact dates of his birth and death are unknown, as well as the family from which he sprang. In 1361, after receiving ecclesiastical tonsure, he went to England to present to Queen Philippa of Hainault an account in verse of the battle of Poitiers. This marked the beginning of the wandering life which led him through the whole of Europe and made him the guest of the chief personages of the end of the fourteenth century. His sojourn in England lasted till 1367.

Froissart composed many poems of love and adventure, such as "l'Epinette Amoureuse", in which he relates the story of his own life, and "Méliador", a poem in imitation of the Round Table cycle, etc. His chief work is the "Chroniques de France, d'Angleterre, d'Ecosse, de Bretagne, de Gascogne, de Flandre et lieux circonvoisins", an account of European wars from 1328 till 1400. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06308b.htm

In Chapter Nine, Richard West recounts the story of the the infamous Visconti brothers, rulers of Milan and Pavia, known for their excessive greed and cruelty in fourteenth century Italy. These "Vipers of Milan" represent some of the best examples of historical European decadence, and promulgated a forty-day torture of suspected enemies upon their rule called a Quarentino, using all of the implements familiar to inquisitors, including racks, wheels, strappados, flayings, and other various barbarities. Bernabo is said to have roasted alive four nuns and a monk out of hatred for the Pope. Many historians suspect that Chaucer was in attendance at the marriage of Bernabo's daughter by Regina, Violante Visconti, who married Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a son of King Edward III of England. West makes great fuss over the menu of the wedding feast, describing it as an incongrous mess of ill-paired meats, "crabs with suckling pig, hare with pike, whole calf with trout, capon with carp..." and covered over with a gold leaf gilding mixed with eggs, saffron, and flour.

Clarence died soon after (Perhaps due to the wedding feast meats?). But it turned out to be Chaucer's next job to deliver greetings in the arrangements of another betrothal courtesy of Bernabo Visconti, as everyone sought to try again obviously to renew the English and Italian alliance with another wedding seal, this time Bernabo would marry another daughter, Caternia, to Richard of Bordeaux, son of the Black Prince. West seems to dither over Chaucer's involvement in the goings on of the most reknowned European tyrants of the day, but appears to forget the feckless slaughters of thousands of French peasants and noblemen by English mercenaries during The Hundred Years War for the sake of territories and tax benefits.

Tyrannical-type bosses appear never unfamiliar to Chaucer, considering the English battles to hold Gascony, they paid his salary as a civil servant. In such cases, he appears as many artists do, as gold leaf upon feckless brutish, incongrous barbaric European meats. But even the Visconti brothers were known to feather their bloody nests with the likes of Petrarch, though one wonders when the tyrants of European courts had time to enjoy the flitting pleasures of poets, perhaps before or after they were consuming strange pairings of gold gilded meats, or during pauses in the engaging of sexual manias or orgies, as breaks in the torturing murders of suspected enemies, or even codas to the strangling of young male servants. These tyrants were able to fit fellows like Chaucer in with a few rhyming couplets and alexandrines? When? As some sort of poetic coaches or referees then?

Chaucer makes notable reference to the Visconti brothers in his prelude to The Legend of Good Women and refers to Visconti exploits in the Monk's Tale, but according to West, it is in the Clerk's Tale that Chaucer reveals his feeling on the topic of the Visconti, with reference to Griselda of Petrarch's Decameron, Chaucer produces his own Griselda to perhaps teach that women should make their husbands jealous and spend money, which is described as tongue in cheek. Some women might not require such encouragement. The Clerk's Tale is also represented as a variant of Cinderella, and that in issues of marriage, love and compatability were often not important where the choices of brides for a royal Prince were concerned. West describes Chaucer's Clerk's Tale as a, "homily on patience and obedience".

But in reality it may have just been a double entendre of simple proportions. Borrowing the characters of Petrarch, a pet of the Visconti, an obvious allusion there. Further, concerning the son of the Black Prince, Chaucer's Prince is being goaded into marrying by his subjects. However British subjects of note were peers and knights expecting bridal benefits to include further pillage and rape in France. The wrong bride often meant chump change and thus potentially usurpation. Their expectation that he should marry a high-born woman is finally met, but secretly the Prince has selected a poor country girl. Perhaps this is a symbolic representation of Visconti dishonour, or perceived wealth, or perceived value of the alliance to the aims of conquest in France. But when the public are fooled by his deception, the Prince then punishes Griselda by removing her children to be raised in Bologna. Obviously another Italian connection there. Then the Prince exchanges Griselda for a younger wife, supposedly due to public opinion, but again tricks her as the new wife is actually Griselda's daughter.

It would be interesting to know more about the actual marriage between the Black Prince's son and Caternia, and the finances of the Visconti Brothers. Perhaps Chaucer had secret party to their books, and perhaps they had little to offer the English than spare daughters.

Define the values conflicts and seek to correct the conflicts, not the values. A Review of: Building Cross-Cultural Competence (Part One)

Define the values conflicts and seek to correct the conflicts, not the values. A Review of: Building Cross-Cultural Competence (Part One)

Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How To Create Wealth from Conflicting Values (Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars) Yale University Press (2000)

This review is long overdue. As determinants of intercultural change in MNCs management theorists should not and realistically cannot be divorced from my perspective on their impact upon my increased reading habits, a quantifiable change in my intrinsic priorities as referencing salary increases versus increased opportunities for educational learning and a desire to attempt self-taught diffusive learning in topics of personal observation and discussion. If every consumer could so delve into the roots of global consumerism trends. So time and again, I attempt to possess my own thoughts on these issues (if I have any that are my own) simply through the readings of the thoughts of others. In relation to culture, specifically the effects of expatriation upon individual perspectives on collective culture, I must return often to ruminate upon suppositions attributed to Clyde Kluckhohn regarding cultural values.

“Anthropology holds up a great mirror to man and lets him look at himself in his infinite variety.”

Carefully considered, anthropology also allows theorists to borrow its ideals and sell them to corporate clients, eager to diverge from participant-observer perspectives and involve themselves in cultural realignments at the level of MNC management hiring practices, educational evaluations, and data compilations which implicate the working practices and successful alignments of nearly half the working world population as their subjects of persistent study. These theorists have all been coaxed and gone irreperably "native". But what is consumed here is not peyote. Wholey business-sponsored research implicates new ideas, based on specific research outcomes.

"Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?"

In intercultural management strategies the question becomes how can all of these impacts be measured and evaluated, how can these dimensions be realigned to maximize profit and growth for MNCs? Under such desired outcomes, an understanding of anthropology, or even a brief interlude with its topics is irrelevant.

"People typically feel their own cultural beliefs and practices are normal and natural, and those of others to be strange, or even inferior- abnormal."

This implicates that anyone attempting to make critical observations upon the logical usefulness of the models of acclaimed cross-cultural experts, specifically outsiders not sponsored or supported by elite organisations, which critically self-examine aspects of culture in their own workforces to implicate reorganisation of localized cultural values to further support global MNC successes, will obviously be considered of inferior analytical logic because the extent of personal understanding of the outcomes is irrelevant. The desired outcomes of cross-cultural business studies are necessarily, and singularly measured by corporate profits and internal or external customer satifaction measures due to new alignments.

I have not dawdled over these pages or orientations however. I have been picking over some of these managerial precepts of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner since July 2004 courtesy of "Riding the Waves of Culture" and "International Management Behaviour" (Lane , DiStefano Maznevski: Fifth Edition). As per the Blackwell Site these authors are heavyweights in the topics: "Henry W. Lane is the Darla and Frederick Brodsky Trustee Professor in International Business and Director of the Institute for Global Innovation Management at Northeastern University. He has written numerous books, articles and case studies and has taught in France, Germany, Finland and Mexico. Joseph J. DiStefano is a Professor at the International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne, and Professor Emeritus at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. He recently spent three years setting up UWO's first off-shore operations in Hong Kong. Martha L. Maznevski is Professor of International Management and Organizational Behavior at the International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne."

That these writers provide more than mere mouthfuls of relevant material for debate should be more than obvious. They are the decorated champions of the application of business-based cross-cultural business management studies for decades. Their outcomes and findings have implicated the successes of foundations-level cross-cultural management research, however flawed, for example, as the IBM-based categorization patterns of Geert Hofstede, easily applied in theory, but easily found to be merely a first step towards standard-setting in an obviously statistics-starved area of study with great heaps of wishful extrapolations of scant statistical data. Trompennars and Hampden-Turner and their purposes can be reviewed at: http://www.7d-culture.nl/index1.html

First of all, this book is useful as a reference text, and deals with a topic of increasing interest to international business, namely the strategic methods by which experts tend to classify and categorize social or soft elements of cultural values on management behaviour which may impact positively on managerial decisions which can quickly effect regional profits and losses. It is a topic area with profitable elements perhaps not immediately tangibly monetary in value,perhaps purpose-built for those ready and capable to attach themselves to the challenges of effectively analyzing and observing changing corporate managerial perspectives on how to do business internationally. One may easily espouse these methods from case study approaches, which rival cookie cutters in their ability to replicate supposed cross-cultural challenges and supposed solutions. Readers may consider these theories not only in their impacts upon their own cultural milieus, but in the ever-expanding international realms where key competitive advantages may often be in unexplored cultural values realignments.



Such a task might be a monumental request when one observes the average CEO or Managerial Cadre of any MNC. Far from being the most innovative thinkers out there, "Type A" CEOs and their snakes and ladders competitive cadres are often the least prepared to evaluate or analyze their individual or collective approaches to cross-cultural dimensions of their global businesses. Their focus is obviously all too often necessarily snakeskins and ladder rungs.



Hence increasing demand for cross-cultural business theorists, applications, and studies. For example, there are plenty of horrific, true to life business pieces out there on the topic of international managerial chaos and horrendous, shareholder-ire-type losses perpetuated by misplaced but stubbornly perceived directorial self-interests. Even once existent mislabeled jars of infant formula were once ignorantly stacked on foreign shelves, interpreted by local nationals (the hoped for consumers) as ground-up babies meats thanks to misplaced research directions on the illiteracy issues of local markets being solved theoretically at the board-room decision level(supposedly) by pictures of smiling happy white babies on labels of little anonymous brown-contents baby foods bottles.

The extent to which such managerial blindness has reached its zenith in modern times may be exemplified by the proliferation of the case-studies methods for teaching the basics of international business measures and cross-cultural management issues. It is in effect, the cheapest, most effective method by which MNCs may attempt to turn horrendous failures in managerial intelligence into opportuntities for promotional aggrandisements, courtesy of intercultural theorists obviously ready, willing, and able, to crow up upon and "cross-culturally fix" what may have been simply a broken marketing idea, or perhaps a human perception, rooted simply from the timeless and human ethnocentric perspective which echos of Kluckhohn. One must admit that learning should often be much more than the elaborate relabeling of poorly selling bottles of product.



Namely, individuals, regardless of their power or position in a corporate entity may continously, and continually appear to make bad decisions based on a perspective of cultural ethnocentrism. That business elites now make greater and greater results-oriented demands of perspectives on cultural values, while at the same time seeking to remove themselves and elevate their own domains further and further, seemingly over and above such values is the real paradox of cross-cultural management. That able theorists and researchers sift and delve for a fee, to implicate decisions made by mostly men and a few women who obviously do not have the skills or experience personally to cross-culturally vet or clear their own corporate strategies to sell products or services globally implies a requirement of specialized knowledge. Research-based leadership strategies that "King of the Mountain" does not teach. However it is quite simply not knowledge requirements which are missing from current business practices, regardless of the current popular edicts of "Knowledge-Based Economies or Management" being seemingly the global business world's newest mantra. It is simply (and perhaps more cheaply) about effective and flexiblized knowledge perspectives. Effectively, perspective is quite a learned attribute. Impossible to measure independently. But its impact on profit and loss, perhaps only global business can evaluate such successes or failures in whatever accounting principles it seeks to display. While at the same time...



Kluckhohn grappled with elements of cultural relativism early in the century and Mirror for Man still reads well into the following millennium. I am a little surprised that it is out of print however. Considering the debts to which modern(living) intercultural business enthusiasts obviously owe their global profits to this particular dead man, it would serve their interests to lay clear foundations back to origins of business-sponsored adaptations and the divergences necessary of their new orientations on similar perspectives. Putting "Mirror for Man" on boardroom tables again would make clear the aspects of continued innovative theories, fresh new ideas, which only originate, seemingly, outside of boardrooms, the kinds of demands innovation requires of cross-cultural theorists, namely, that theoretical constructions in contemporary times merely appear to teeter upon historical sequentialities and recent business-realm references. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/007035071X/104-7761365-6414369?v=glance&n=283155



The relativistic perspective on cultures which appears to support over-inflated individualistic perspectives on "anything goes" in developed economies, seemingly concurrent with corporate ideals of defining and segmenting markets upon which to capitalize greater sales of products and services at the cost of and without clearly supporting pro-social or communitarian mechanisms, those social cooperations of responsible business management, pillars of community, or even supporting values of spiritual community easily required for eons by evolving business-oriented societies and through which over the long-term individual relativist values have owed their existence (including those by which corporations increasingly seek to define their social responsibilites) is carefully noted by Trompennars and Hampden-Turner. But sadly it really appears they are preaching to quite a tiny choir of seeming crickets out here.

Individualism in developed economies lends itself to over-arching relativisms of cultural valuations, especially in comparativisms, which appears to fragment and isolate communities, especially those existing outside of corporate governance, even one of the world's finest statisticians supposed that good theories were more worthy of trust, and that one should never trust statistics (I will not name the man here, but he also appears quite dead theoretically by contemporary standards). But can statistics alone be blamed for what appears the perfection of greed-based mechanisms of business sustainability? Must every global business leader economically sign away its cultural community for a uniquely business-oriented facsimile? Where goes the herd's profits? Where goes the collective middle-class cushion? Will cross-cultural theorists explore such a phemonena?




"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." Aaron Levenstein

Far from the obvious origins of their methods of observation, Trompennars and Hampden-Turner are not espousing a benign, soft theoretical offshoot of anthropology/psychology/or sociology in my mind. Nor do they appear as malevolent, wildly-inspired or maddened experimentalists. Trompennars and Hampden-Turner are simply well-selling a service menu of cross-cultural management studies and their models. They represent a number of cross-cultural management theory chimera out there to explain profit-based potentialities of cross-cultural perspectives to a market-place hung-up on statistical analysis and the sacrifice too often of common sense to profit maximization. There is no non-partisan element in these kinds of business-oriented attempts to socially remould or refashion international enterprises or global cultural perspectives. All the players are in it for business improvements with tangible success rates, realignments of cultural values which implicate increased successes of service or product sales globally are hot commodities.

Over and over, throughout their ministrations, these writers never absolutely tell a reader that the profits of inter-cultural competency are intimately related to the extent of successful effective or thus emotional or intrinsic values changes willingly made by an individual reader (what other kind of reader is there?)in one's own international business perspective. So individual readers may implicate changes in business practice independently as a result of individual responsibilities or positions in global companies. That would be too short a message to be spun out over four hundred pages. I just hope I am not the only little nest-weaver-spider to look at it this way.

The collective thus effective business changes possible reflect the profits available to businesses which point to effectively changed perspectives among individuals on how to do business internationally. As most adult educators will attest, effective values are the most difficult sets of learning tasks to achieve or measure, most businesses are at a loss to explain or even define their effective needs culturally, let alone the cross-cultural dynamics required of MNC growth in competency in cross-cultural management. As these are the most intangible qualities of individuals and collective cultures their being oriented from profit-based perspectives is often a hit and miss approach.

Thus impacts of perspective upon global business corporate cultures are diverse, extensive, and imply in worst cases, the remoulding of corporate values which heighten the value of certain localized values in support of global company missions locally and diminish certain localized values deemed of lower value to globalized entities. This effect of causes, profits-based increases, which demands the individual or localized culture to locally adapt to be useful to a corporate-defined culture, this is the element of the discussion which really matters. But the effect of which never appears to be mentioned. Who would willingly analyze the woeful effects of corporate cultural effects upon localized cultural employees? Who would even fund such studies?



It would be easy to suppose then that the very foundations of business intercultural management studies have effectively hijacked their sociological underpinnings, the benefits of method, and the base value orientations useful for an appreciation of the deep interest in global cultures of writers such as Clyde Kluckhohn. In his review of Navaho witchcraft, he noted with regularity that those individuals who most often claimed of spiritual possession or curses and grudge spells were more often than not second sons, or non-power position community members, and thus power was often reoriented through accusations of witchcraft. As I have little illusion over the global power players in corporate and cross-cultural studies dynamics, I expect no one to cry fowl over my mere collected observations here. Cross-cultural management is a hot topic. But as many aspects of best practices in global business, it could cool over time.



Clyde Kluckhohn
1905-1960
"Clyde Kluckhohn was born in 1905 in LeMars, Iowa. He attended Princeton University until he left in 1923 due to poor health. He then spent a summer in the American Southwest where he developed his interests in both the past and the present. His interests were varied including archaeology, social anthropology, art, psychiatry, religion and language. He was a cultural anthropologist with a deep interest in culture and personality. He chose this profession based on his interest in psychology while at the same time expressing his interest in cultural diversity. He felt that diversities of authentic cultures must be represented in personality psychology. This contrasted beliefs of the universality of culture, which states that certain biological, psychological, social, and cultural features are shared by all human populations in every culture" (Kottak, 1997. pp.43).

Clyde Kluckhohn's solution to locating universals of personality while at the same time respecting the factual diversity of cultures was accomplished in the following manner. He devised breaking the problem down into manageable chunks in order to set limits on the demand for general trends. Clyde Kluckhohn was a firm believer in the principles of personality psychology. He elaborated this in an article entitled, Anthropology and Psychology. His respect was shown in an article for psychology, with the first line reading, "The anthropologist looks at the psychologist as the cat might look at the king."(University of Pennsylvania). Kluckhohn displayed the fundamental importance of cultural anthropology as a source of information about human nature.

Dr. Kluckhohn went on to study the Navaho culture and personality. After extensive studies, Kluckhohn wrote two more cultural works. The first was a book entitled, Mirror for Man in 1952 and Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Encyclopedia.com). In his first work, Mirror for Man, Kluckhohn wrote about the relations between biology, culture, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativism. Relating to personality psychology, Kluckhohn felt that people think their own cultural beliefs and practices are normal and natural, and those of others are strange or even inferior (Keel, umsl.edu). Kluckhohn's belief that we are the product of a strange and interesting mix of biology and culture is highly applicable to both psychology and anthropology.

Clyde Kluckholm was the Curator of Southwestern American Ethnology at the Peabody Museum until his death in 1960."

(http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/klmno/kluckhohn_clyde.html)

To attempt then to encapsulate the past forty years of intercultural applications of cultural values orientations in the perspective that they have been most useful to profit-based business communities, in particular, international businesses attempting to streamline and rationalize their own multinational dimensions following periodic new market entries, mergers or acquisitions is not an unfair, unjust, or ill-conceived conclusion. But it is a little like deciding not to change one's own perspective on intercultural business orientiations.

MNCs are not unsuccessfully re-evaluating the ways they do businesses every day. They define science and industry-based research interests to a greater extent daily. The elements of purity supposed by research institutes in academia are daily realizing that business alignments define the issues of research and study. Then these aspects of cross-cultural value systems comparisons have developed due to their usefulness and thus may be more than mere constructions upon more base, more fundamentally simple orientations, such as those of Kluckhohn, which do appear to focus on individual variations at a more localized level of observation and appreciation. While individual orientations are an element of global cross-cultural observation, individuals are not the clear focus of redemption for business-based modelling and case studies methodologies unless they are representative stake- or share-holders. If anything, their findings have provoked greater cause for statistically honourable conclusions which I think is a good idea.

The dimensions of cross-cultural orientations courtesy of Trompennars and Hampden-Turner

1. The first dimensions of Trompennars and Hampden-Turner are the universalism versus particularism debates. These imply the observance of cultural values which can be most easily differentiated are in the realms of degree of rules and laws creation and abiding, versus the degree to which exceptionals and unique circumstances may be linked which undermine them.

2. Next the latitudes of individualism versus communitarianism implicate the degrees to which personal freedoms and competitiveness may be measured in concert with their polar cooperative and responsibility to group values.

3. Further the debate includes the tug of war between specificity or analytical/objective values versus diffusiveness or relational or holistic values.

4. The variations between ascribed and achieved status are also measured.

5. The polarity of inner versus outer directiveness are also analyzed.

6. Time sequence in sequential versus synchronous time events are also considered.

A benefit to the reader of such orientations must remain simply to be open to learning more about how one individually relates to each. That each dynamic exists to some extent in every blueprint for cultural evolution in our world of highly defined cultures is an interesting first step to learning about how one may profit from the exercise of such self-analysis. However, the more one reads dynamically, diffusively, and dimensionally, hopefully, the more one realizes that the purposes and intent of originators of such concepts, namely that of peaceable cultural exchange, for its own intangible value, has been overtaken by a business-motivated imperative, to the peacable alignment of global cultures enveloped by corporate objectives, which increasingly appears to implicate the moulding of cultures above and beyond the boundaries of which any mere shop-keeper or entrepreneur should be ethically permitted to require or demand of any status quo, a modern status quo which appears only more efficently incapable of observing what did go before, specifically absent appears to be an intrinsic understanding of the organic dimensions of cultures as they existed for millennia before the free market capitalization of free flowing capital markets.

Which makes possible emasculation of cultural values by MNCs a fair bit easier and altogether impossible to trace.